Robert Jenrick’s complaints about “not seeing another white face” in Birmingham’s Handsworth show the Tories will push racism to try to grab votes.

Jenrick’s hard right turn is creepy because this formerly “Liberal” Tory, who was so blandly Cameron-centrist-pro-EU that he was called “Robert Generic,” now uses the language of the National Front.

At Tory conference anti-migrant, anti-asylum-seeker, prejudiced and racist language was ubiquitous: Mirroring Jenrick’s manoeuvre, it spread to supposedly “liberal” Tories.

I went to a conference meeting of Tory group Bright Blue. Founded when David Cameron was leader, Bright Blue see themselves as a socially conscious liberal Tory group.

Their slogan is “Our work is about defending and improving liberal society.” Their “advisory board” has Labour figures — former ministers Margaret Hodge and John Denham and former Blair adviser John McTernan — alongside a dozen leading Tories.

This supposed liberalism evaporated over migration. They had a debate on “How Conservatism can be popular and effective again.”

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp was on the panel. Philp is pushing his anti-migrant message hard: he attacks asylum-seekers as criminals. He also attacks the much greater numbers of “legal” migrants, claiming “mass migration has certainly damaged social cohesion.”

But what Philp said for the “Bright Blue” crowd was instructive: Bright Blue wrote a list of 10 Tory objectives. Philp said this wouldn’t work, because “it is hard to get attention” for the Tories, so any list had to be reduced to two: immigration and the economy. Philp was making clear the Tories are going hard on immigration mostly to get “attention.”

Philp was joined on the panel by Jesse Norman MP, a “Bright Blue” favourite, seen as a Tory liberal. In 2022 Jesse Norman wrote a “no-confidence” letter to then PM Boris Johnson, complaining “the Rwanda policy is ugly, likely to be counterproductive and of doubtful legality.”

So did Norman object to Philp and the Tories’ plan to reinstate their policy of deporting all asylum-seekers to Rwanda, or his “ugly“ language?

No. Norman argued pushing against “immigration” was essential, saying “it’s almost a threshold condition for seriousness” for would-be Tory voters.

This is the current Tory position, across the board, from former “liberals” like Jenrick to supposedly current “liberals” like Norman — they want to hammer the anti-immigrant button, because they can’t see any other way to beat Reform.

The Tory conference was quite direct about this manoeuvre: the conference slogan was “Stronger Economy. Stronger Borders.”

They want to have a “stronger economy” — which for the Tories means more privatisation, deregulation and lower taxes, and will use their “stronger borders” message — meaning their newly supercharged anti-migrant and racist prejudices — to get it.

Those cynically adopting this hard anti-migrant persona are more sinister in some ways than lifelong bigots. They are willing to play with prejudice without principle.

If the Conservatives end up in coalition with Farage — a distinct possibility — we can’t expect the Tories to blunt Reform’s prejudices in government. Quite the opposite, they might lean into them more, and deliver them with more efficiency. 

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.